What is Voyant?
Voyant is a textual analysis tool for digital texts that I will be using quite frequently in my Digital Humanities project. Voyant offers you many tools including trends which is a visualization tool that will let you know how frequently a word appears in the text, a reader tool which you can upload any type of text you want, and collocates which can let you know what terms are being connected by the words that are being brought up with each key term. Using Voyant for my project, I am able to uncover a close reading of Macbeth and see what patterns are occurring and how they are being used. Down below, includes what each of the tools that I used for my data look like and what purpose they serve.
TRENDS TOOL
This is called the trends tool and it can be used to see how frequently a word is displayed in each scene. By using this tool, I was able to take note of where in the text did mentions of Macduff and fear reach their highest peak and analyze how they were connected using close reading.
READER TOOL
This is an example of the reader tool where I use one of the scenes in Macbeth and here you can put any digital text that you would like and have full access to the material. This tool can be really helpful too if you would like to break up a scene and only look at that scene. Something that is also useful is if you are looking for a word in the text, you can type it in the search bar below not only will it highlight the word for you but in the purple section but the zig-zags that are located there represent how often the word is displayed in the text and when the word reaches it’s highest peak.
COLLOCATES TOOL
This is a tool that can let you know what context term will appear around the key term and this is what made me become interested in looking into Macduff and fear. Even though there is 1 count, I was interested to see if these terms were connected in other ways, ways in which you couldn’t pick up from a distant reading.
To find out what other tools Voyant offers click on the linked tab below!